By almost any standard, this is a surprising overperformance by Democrats (or underperformance by Republicans, depending on how you look at it). But more than a week past Election Day, the shock has subsided a bit, leaving room to move on from racehorse politics to a more substantive discussion of what the next two years of American politics will look like.

By dint of their position in the White House and Senate, Democrats are going to hold onto most of the power in D.C., so it’s worthwhile to focus on what the next two years have in store for the Democratic Party in particular. On this front, there are several interesting and important questions about how the next two years will play out. Five are at the top of my mind: (1) Will Joe Biden run for reelection? (2) What will happen to Democratic leadership in Congress? (3) What parts of their agenda will Democrats be able to pass? (4) Is there a chance for Democrats to make any bipartisan deals? (5) Will progressives and moderates fight or find unity?

The next two years will likely feature a few bumps for Democrats. But if Joe Biden runs for reelection as I expect him to, and once the contests for Democratic leadership in the House have concluded, Democrats will be on a glide path toward party unity.

Will Biden Run in 2024?

Joe Biden has been running for president for the past 35 years. Ever since his first doomed bid for the 1988 Democratic nomination, Biden has imagined himself as the leader of the free world. In 2020, he finally realized that vision when he toppled Donald Trump. And now that Biden has finally achieved his life’s ambition, he has to determine if he is satisfied with one term as president or if he wants another.

Ambitious political animals like Biden don’t just give up on the dreams of their own accord. There is only really one reason I can see Biden choosing not to run for reelection: his health. Biden will be 81 by the time of the 2024 election, and it’s not hard to imagine him having a serious health incident that inhibits his ability to perform the duties of the president. And even if that doesn’t happen, there still could be a viral moment that is perceived as evidence that Biden is too old and feeble to be president. In either situation, Biden could face enough political, familial, or physical pressure to pass the presidential baton.

Barring that, though, I find it unlikely that Biden will retire early. The strong Democratic performance in the midterms gave Biden a new lease on life. If he faces any internal party pressure to resign, Biden can just point to the party’s midterm success as proof that he’s the right guy to continue leading the party. Biden says he’ll make his official decision “early next year.” We’ll have to wait and see, but my instinct is that the decision’s already been made.

Democratic Leadership in Congress

On Thursday, Nancy Pelosi announced that she would be stepping down from her position as leader of the House Democrats, ending 20 years in the top role. The decision is bound to set off a scramble for power within the Democratic conference. It remains to be seen exactly what Pelosi’s longtime deputies—Steny Hoyer from Maryland and James Clyburn from South Carolina—plan to do. If they decide to retire from leadership alongside Pelosi, which seems likely, it will usher in a new generation of Democratic leadership.

No matter what Clyburn and Hoyer decide, however, competition for jobs up and down Democratic leadership will be fierce, unpredictable and incredibly difficult to follow for those who don’t already know the players.

Just consider the fight for minority leader: In corner A, we have Hakeem Jeffries, an ally of Pelosi’s who is currently the #5 Democrat in the House. But Jeffries is despised by some on the left for forming Team Blue PAC, which was designed to protect Democratic incumbents from being primary, but which progressives saw as a way to stymie progressive insurgents. In corners, B and C are Hoyer and Clyburn, who may decide that they’re not ready to step down alongside Pelosi and that it’s their time to lead the conference. In corner, D is the candidate that the progressive wing of the caucus will likely enlist to compete with the more moderate (or “corporate,” as his detractors call him) Jeffries.

My money would be on Jeffries: He’s already in leadership, and he has allies across the conference. He’s also young and Black, representing a sharp break from the 80-something-year-olds who currently lead the party. But in reality, exactly how this will play out is anybody’s guess. The race will be complex, will rely on hundreds of relationships and personalities and will be tough to follow. And the same is true for the other top Democratic spots: whip, caucus chair, caucus vice chair, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair and on down the list

Again, exactly how these fights will play out depends on what Hoyer and Clyburn decide to do. If they step down, there will be a scramble for their leadership posts. And even if they stay, they may still face competition from younger upstarts who decide that now is their moment. In any case, it will be worth becoming familiar with whoever comes out on top in these leadership fights, because they will likely be pivotal figures within the Democratic Party for years to come.

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, machinations are much less exciting and less complicated. Chuck Schumer is going to hold onto his job as Majority Leader. And his top deputies — Dick Durban and Patty Murray — will hold onto their jobs too.

The Legislative Agenda

Legislatively, Democrats will be stuck. Any hope they had of building on the past two years and passing more of their agenda died when it became clear that Republicans would take control of the House. But this setback could play to Democrats’ benefit in an electoral sense, as they won’t be allowed to overplay their hand and pass an unpopular progressive agenda. If, for instance, Joe Manchin hadn’t put the brakes on the $2.4 trillion Build Back Better legislation that passed the House, Democrats would likely have faced much more backlash in the midterms for forcing through a massive spending package. With the House in Republican hands, Democrats need not worry about getting out over their skis and enacting an electorally unpopular agenda.

That said, it’s not as if Democrats won’t be able to do anything. With Democratic control of the Senate, Biden will be able to keep churning out judicial appointments and fill the federal bench with more progressive and diverse judges. Similarly, he could continue to sign executive orders (with occasionally dubious constitutionality) pushing progressive priorities, as he did when he canceled billions of dollars of student debt. There are plenty of other things Biden could try to do with his presidential pen: On the progressive wish list are changing cannabis’s category so that it’s no longer a Schedule I drug, making more Americans qualify for federal benefits by changing how poverty is calculated, restricting oil drilling on federal lands and so on.

But the president can only do so much alone. Ultimately, if Democrats want to pass any legislation, they’ll need some level of bipartisan support to do so.

Chances for Bipartisanship

During his time in Congress and as vice president, Joe Biden earned a reputation as a bipartisan dealmaker. He made a point of befriending colleagues across the aisle—to the extent that progressives attacked him during the presidential primary for the friendships, he forged in the 1970s with racist and segregationist senators. During the first two years of his presidency, Biden has managed to get bipartisan support for several major pieces of legislation, including bills on gun safety, infrastructure and semiconductor investments. Though his bipartisan bona fides certainly took a few hits when he labeled his Republican opponents as “semi-fascist,” Biden is still, at heart, a guy who likes a good old-fashioned compromise.

This is why I’m moderately confident that Democrats and Republicans will at least attempt to come together on some bipartisan legislation. It’s unlikely that they’ll make deals on any particularly contentious issues of the day, such as immigration or healthcare, but some policy spheres have enough overlap that some bills may find their way through the House and Senate.

Three policy areas, in particular, have the potential for compromise. The first is addressing the threat posed by China. The semiconductor bill passed earlier in the year is one example of this kind of legislation, and it’s not hard to imagine Congress passing more bills to invest in domestic manufacturing of technology, strengthen the non-China supply chain, further restrain trade with China, force TikTok to split from its Chinese owner, Bytedance, or support Taiwan militarily.

The second area where Republicans and Democrats may come together is on restraining “big tech.” Populists on both sides of the aisle, from Republican Senator Josh Hawley to Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, believe America’s major technology companies are exerting a nefarious influence on Americans. While their diagnoses for exactly what’s wrong can diverge (Democrats are generally worried about dis- and misinformation, while Republicans are more concerned with censorship and biased content moderation), both sides of the aisle have expressed concern about the monopoly power of companies such as Facebook, Apple and Amazon, and policymakers have been moving legislation through the Senate to address some of these concerns.

The third area with potential for bipartisanship is criminal justice issues. The libertarian-leaning right often is sympathetic to reforms in policing and criminal justice. Further, Republicans and Democrats were able to pass the First Step Act, a bipartisan bill championed by Republican Senator Tim Scott and signed by President Donald Trump in 2018, which made several reforms to federal prisons and criminal sentencing and instituted programs to reduce recidivism. Perhaps there’s room on this front for a Second Step.

Also, some contentious policy areas may unexpectedly command bipartisan support. Immigration is a polarizing issue, but maybe there’s room for the GOP to moderate and sign a Dream Act into law in exchange for more funding for border security. Or maybe populists will come together to ban congress members from trading stocks. There’s also the chance that smaller or less flashy bills could make it through, such as reforming the permitting process (a pet project of Joe Manchin’s and something Republicans could seemingly get on board with) or making it easier to open a bank account (an issue on which Republican Tim Scott and Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto have worked together). In other words, despite the tenor of politics, I wouldn’t count out the possibility of bipartisanship completely.

Polarization or Party Unity?

There’s no getting around the fact that the upcoming fights for Democratic leadership in the House are very likely to be contentious. And if I am wrong and Joe Biden decides not to run for reelection, the presidential primary is also likely to be a fierce battle between moderate and progressive wings of the party.

But once the leadership team is in place, and if Biden announces his reelection campaign, there’s reason to believe that Democrats will be relatively unified over the next two years. With Republicans taking control of the House and likely launching investigations that Democrats see as spurious, Trump running for president and DeSantis entering the national scene, Democrats will have no shortage of foils on the right.

Furthermore, Democrats saw last week that running against the GOP is actually a pretty good strategy for winning elections. With the stakes so high heading into 2024—many Democrats see a second Trump or a DeSantis presidency as a threat to the country’s very existence—the party will find it morally and electorally necessary to tamp down internal squabbles and unify against the GOP. The fact that Republicans are going to hold the House will make this even easier, because Democrats won’t really have any chance of passing a positive agenda, meaning there won’t be fights over how far to push their legislative goals.

We’ve already seen some progressive Democrats start to circle the wagons. Elizabeth Warren, for instance, published an opinion essay in The New York Times saying that “this [midterm] electoral success belongs to Mr. Biden”—a man she was pillorying just three years ago for being insufficiently progressive. None of this is to say that Democrats will find complete unity and all intraparty disputes will evaporate, but most fights will either not take place at all or will happen behind the scenes. The unity will look especially stark when compared with the intraparty feuds that are barreling toward the GOP.

A Caveat About Political Punditry

The tight margins in both the Senate and the House mean that there is a good chance of something unexpected happening and changing the course of American politics. A political scandal, a rogue progressive or conservative, a stubborn moderate or any number of political surprises could all upset the apple cart. And the election in Georgia, though it won’t decide control of the Senate, will determine how much breathing room Democrats have to lose support from moderate senators such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

In other words, everything that happens is contingent on the personalities and incentives of hundreds of politicians and the quirks of political fate. It would be foolish to assume we know exactly how the next two years of politics will play out. But it would also be foolish not to try, given all that’s at stake.

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The Senate will reconvene on Sunday at noon to resume consideration of the massive $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package.

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Much of the testimony was aimed at Apple’s App Store and the Google Play app marketplace, with executives from music streaming platform Spotify and online dating holding company Match Group contending that the tech giants have used their dominant positions in the app platform space to charge commissions as high as 30% of app developers’ total sales.

Klobuchar kicked off the hearing with allegations that Apple and Google are gatekeepers who use their dominant positions to “exclude or suppress” competition. “We’re not angry about success,’’ Klobuchar said. “We simply want to make sure that capitalism keeps going in a strong, strong way. This situation, to me, doesn’t seem like that’s happening.”

Rebutting the allegations were Apple’s chief compliance officer and vice president of corporate law, Kyle Andeer, and Google’s senior director of public policy and government relations, Wilson White. Both highlighted how their platforms have helped developers reach billions of customers worldwide.

“When we introduced the App Store in 2008, creating software was difficult and often expensive,” said Andeer. Apple has invested “significantly” to build over 250,000 application programming interfaces for programmers to build apps on its hardware devices, he said, including iPhones and iPads. “The App Store isn’t just a store. It’s a studio stacked with canvases and brushes and paints — the tools that artists need to create their works. And it’s a gallery where they can display and sell their creations.”

White, meanwhile, described Android as an open-source operating system, as opposed to Apple’s closed system, which he said means that developers have more freedom and flexibility to make changes to the operating systems of Google’s Android. “At Google, we believe that everyone should have equal access to the benefits of mobile devices,” said White. “And we designed Android and Google Play with freedom, openness and accessibility in mind.”

Match Group’s chief legal officer, Jared Sine, meanwhile, sharply criticized both marketplaces as anti-competitive monopolies. “Apple and Google respond that they built the platforms and should be able to decide what business models they use,” Sine said. “I submit that the railroad companies built the railroads. The steel companies built the steel mills. The telephone companies built the telephone lines. The creators of all of these incredible innovations each made the same argument at different times. It did not justify a monopoly then, and it should not today.”

The fee from the App Store is Match Group’s single largest expense, at over half a billion dollars, Sine said. Sine also described a conversation he’d had with the head lawyer of the App Store team a few years ago after Apple rejected a version of one of its Taiwanese apps which sought to implement ID verification rules that were already being used in Japan. Seeking an explanation for why Apple rejected the app, Sine said, “I was told in no uncertain terms that [Apple] disagreed with our assessment of how to keep our users safe. He added that we should just be glad that Apple is not taking all of Match’s revenue, telling me, ‘You owe us every dime you made.’ ”

Sine also criticized Google, contending that it lured the online dating company to the Android ecosystem “under false pretenses” that the platform was free. “Years after helping them establish their app store monopoly by bringing our apps and our customers to the Play Store, Google is leveraging its monopoly power to change the rules,” Sine said, referring to the fact that Google will start tying its in-app payment system to access to the Play Store starting in September this year.

Sine also referenced a call between Match Group and Google on Tuesday — the day before the antitrust hearing — in which Google inquired why Sine’s testimony would be different from what Match Group had said in its recent earnings report: that it would work with Google on the new in-app payment process. Sen. Richard Blumental, D-Conn., inquired about the nature of the call, asking Sine whether it felt like a threat.

“When you receive something like that, Senator, from a company that can turn you off overnight, you’re always a little intimidated,” said Sine. He added, “We’re all afraid, is the reality, Senator.”

Spotify, meanwhile, has been one of the App Store’s biggest adversaries since 2019, when the company filed a complaint to the European Commission, claiming that Apple was unfairly restricting rivals to its own service, Apple Music, and describing the 30% fee as anticompetitive.

Apple has the story of its own App Store “backward when it claims that companies like Spotify are free-riding on Apple’s innovations,” Horacio Gutierrez, Spotify’s chief legal officer and head of global affairs, testified before the committee. Apple’s iPhones and other devices owe their success to the apps of companies like Spotify. “The proof is in Apple’s own slogan — ‘There’s an App for that,’” Gutierrez said.

The Spotify executive explained how when Apple levied its 30% fee on Spotify, it forced the streaming company to increase its subscription prices for years from $9.99 per month to $12.99 per month. Shortly after Apple introduced the tax, it launched Apple Music at $9.99 per month, Gutierrez said.

“It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to realize that this abusive conduct hurts consumers by depriving them of information about a product that competes with Apple,” he said.

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The House earlier this month charged Trump with inciting an insurrection against the government by inflaming a mob that overran the Capitol on Jan. 6. The riot, which disrupted Congress’ count of President Joe Biden’s electoral win, left five dead, including a Capitol Police officer.

The Senate will need 67 votes to convict Trump. If all 50 Democrats support a guilty verdict, they will need 17 Republicans to join them.

Speaking after Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., expressed concerns that Trump would not have enough time to mount a defense. He had asked the House to send the article on Jan. 28 to ensure “a full and fair process.”

In a statement Friday, Pelosi said Trump “will have had the same amount of time to prepare for trial” as the House impeachment managers, who will make the chamber’s case before the Senate.

Trump has hired South Carolina attorney Butch Bowers to defend him during the trial. The nine impeachment managers are Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Diana DeGette of Colorado, David Cicilline of Rhode Island, Joaquin Castro of Texas, Eric Swalwell and Ted Lieu of California, Stacey Plaskett, the delegate for the U.S. Virgin Islands, Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania and Joe Neguse of Colorado.

Pelosi contended Thursday that the managers would not need to prepare as much evidence for the second trial as they did for the first last year.

“This year, the whole world bore witness to the president’s incitement, to the execution of his call to action, and the violence that was used,” the California Democrat told reporters.

Schumer said he has spoken to McConnell about “the timing and duration of the trial,” but did not give any details about how long it will last. The Democratic leader aims to balance impeachment with confirmation of Biden’s Cabinet members and passage of a coronavirus relief bill.

“The Senate must and will do all three,” he said Friday.

The first trial Trump faced last year for charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress lasted about three weeks. The Republican-held Senate acquitted him.

Schumer downplayed GOP concerns that Democrats would rush through the trial after a quick process in the House, which impeached Trump only a week after the insurrection.

“It will be a full trial. It will be a fair trial,” he said.

McConnell has not indicated whether he will vote to convict Trump. On Tuesday, he said the rioters “were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”

Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania both called on Trump to resign while he still held office. Neither has said how they plan to vote on conviction.

Murkowski said in a statement earlier this month that the House responded to the Capitol attack “swiftly, and I believe, appropriately, with impeachment.”

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Far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini called last week for swift elections after withdrawing the support of his anti-immigration League party from an increasingly acrimonious alliance with the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S).

While the government is still in place, the Senate must decide whether to initiate a no-confidence vote in Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s 14-month-old administration.

Talks among the heads of political groupings in the upper house on Monday afternoon failed to reach unanimous agreement, recalling senators from their holidays to debate a calendar for the complex constitutional process of a no-confidence vote.

Senators, who are to meet from 1600 GMT on Tuesday, are also expected to vote on whether Conte should address the Senate on the crisis on August 20.

Together the M5S and the opposition Democratic Party (PD) would have enough votes to approve that motion, potentially thwarting Salvini’s bid to bring down the government.

Salvini wants elections to be held quickly, possibly in October, to capitalise on opinion polls suggesting the League might garner 36-38 percent of votes.

Populist leader Salvini effectively ended the ruling alliance on Thursday, saying afterwards he had had enough of working with the M5S and what he said was its refusal to collaborate on key issues.

The two parties have seen a stunning reversal of fortunes since forming a government after the M5S won 32 percent of votes and the League 18 percent in 2018.

Salvini has been taking his message to the beaches at the height of the summer holiday season, seeking to build on the League’s strong showing in May’s European Parliament elections when it won 34 percent of the vote, twice that of the M5S.

TRT World speaks to Edoardo Bressanelli, a Senior Lecturer in European Politics.

Electoral pact 

But Salvini would still need parliamentary allies to form a government, saying on Monday that he would “in the coming hours” meet former premier Silvio Berlusconi and the head of the extreme-right Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, to “propose an electoral pact”.

Tycoon Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and Brothers of Italy could each win 6 to 8 percent of votes in an election, according to opinion polls.

Salvini has been relentlessly campaigning in southern Italy, the M5S’s traditional heartland and far from the League’s historical political base in the north.

The social media-loving Salvini, who is also deputy prime minister, has been burnishing his “man of the people” image through a series of beach selfies in swimming trunks in recent days.

Salvini says he wants an election in order to form a stable, five-year government without the constant bickering with M5S, which is politically distant from the League’s hardline anti-immigration stance.

He says he wants to implement radical tax cuts and initiate public works projects to kickstart the Italian economy.

‘Stop the barbarians’ 

But the M5S is among those opposed to swift elections, with Di Maio calling for parliament first to implement a planned parliamentary reform which would slash the number of lawmakers from 950 to 605, potentially diluting the League’s power.

The M5S’s founder, comedian Beppe Grillo, called for a “republican front” to prevent “the barbarians” forming a government.

Matteo Renzi, who governed for PD from 2014-16, called for the formation of a technocrat government to avoid “giving the extreme right our children’s future”.

The M5S, PD and other parties should support an “institutional government” to pass the parliamentary reform and next year’s budget to avoid an automatic rise in VAT which would hit the least well-off the hardest, Renzi said.

However, the PD is also riven with divisions between those loyal to Renzi and supporters of current party leader Nicola Zingaretti.

The party is also divided over whether to try to form a coalition with M5S, something they refused to do after last May’s elections, prompting the unwieldy M5S-League alliance.

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